


Fireworks

by casuistor



Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Canon Universe, Character Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-06
Updated: 2017-11-06
Packaged: 2019-01-30 02:53:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12644673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/casuistor/pseuds/casuistor
Summary: The story of the night L dies as told exclusively through Light's perspective in prose form.





	Fireworks

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this fic several years ago and by now i'm not all that happy with it, but hey. Today is November 5th and the date demands this be re-posted.

Although Light tries to be subtle about his vigilance, he doesn’t miss the exact instant when the shinigami slips, cat-like, through the wall into the adjacent room and out of sight from the edges of his peripheral vision. The reaper doesn’t have a choice because Light has stripped her of them, and all of this time between getting his memories back in the helicopter and now has been nothing but a time bomb ticking down to the moment Rem finally understood that she’d toyed with the wrong human. The moment when L learned exactly why you don’t mess with gods.

Detonation is going to be beautiful.

It must be unfortunate, he thinks, to be so devoted to someone that they can be used against you, to be subject to that kind of easy manipulation. Light is certain such weakness doesn’t exist inside him.

A crash is heard through the computer speakers and Light’s eyes widen at first, then he’s straining not to smirk like a madman behind the hair that has fallen into his eyes and the shadows that obscure his face. A swooping sensation starts in his stomach as his mood soars all the way up to the underbelly of the clouds. He knows instinctively that he has won. This is the taste of perfect, absolute victory.

_I didn’t expect you to go that far, Rem._

His pitifully low expectations of the shinigami’s intelligence had only extended as far as her showing some discretion before writing Ryuuzaki’s name into her note, but she’s gone and surpassed expectations by getting rid of Watari as well. Light might even be grateful to her, now, in the however few, negligible seconds she has left to live before love kills her.

“Watari?” L tentatively calls out, clearly as confused by what’s going on as every other fool in the industrialized room but Light is.

Then all of the screens flash with the mysterious message: “All data deleted.” The members of the task force are flummoxed, and momentarily, so is Light. He hadn’t known about this particular contingency plan of L’s, but then again, L would be meticulous enough to plan out and dictate an elderly man’s last few seconds of life without batting an eyelash, wouldn’t he? However, now isn’t the time to marvel at L’s ruthless pragmatism: now that Watari is dead, it is obvious that L, Ryuuzaki, Ryuuga —whatever the ever-living hell his goddamn name is— is going to be next. Light starts the forty-second countdown in his head with a sickle-shaped smile.

“Where’s the shinigami?” the detective suddenly demands. “Everyone, the shiniga-!"  
But something is horribly wrong. L’s last deduction, his final words, as brilliant as they would have undoubtedly been, go unfinished, choked off and petering out into forced silence.

_What’s the matter, L? Cat got your tongue?_

Light keeps his lips tightly sealed, but he’s enthralled as he watches L with the focused intensity of a hawk, its sharp talons outstretched and swooping in for the kill. The task force is his own alibi now—it all works so _beautifully_ to his advantage. Kira needs to write a name into the death note to kill, and of course, perfect and innocent, blameless Light ‘Inventor of rules and maker of worlds’ Yagami has done no such thing.

The metal spoon falls out of L’s thin bony hand, drawn to the floor by gravity after the spindly fingers gripping its handle slacken. It’s a split second’s worth of amusing foreshadow: the detective takes a tumble, falling in a clean parabolic arc that almost perfectly mirrors his fallen cutlery as the chair crashes to the floor. Time itself seems to telescope and seconds tick by with exaggerated slowness, as if the moment wants to immortalize itself for Light’s benefit.

Light doesn’t have to try very hard to look stunned by this development. After months and months of dealing with this aggravating bastard and all of that delicate planning, this is finally it. He remembers in one suspended beat when L is still airborne, all of his difficulties and travails, along with all of his fury and frustration in trying to kill this one mangy man, and his own heart pounds faster and faster behind his ribs. There’s no one else in the world who has ever managed to make Light question himself the way L has provoked and necessitated it. One misstep could be fatal, I have to be careful, I can’t mess up – are the thoughts that kept him up late at night, and it’s that part of Light, the part that recognizes L as an intellectual rival underneath all of his clownish buffoonery, that has frozen.

In the instant that he dives down to catch his fallen “friend” and the two of them happen to lock eyes, Light stares with wide eyes, scarcely even breathing as he hungrily gorges himself on the look of utter confusion on L’s stupid face. The smirking is uncontrollable at this point; it’s entropy in action and every bit as natural as breathing.

“Ryuuzaki?!”

The slight catch in his voice as Light calls out to the dying detective in his arms is unscripted; there really is that much emotion behind the name. God, it’s difficult not to laugh then and there, but Light can’t let any of that laughter bubble out to the surface right now, he has a show to put on for the task force. For now, Light absolutely can’t be Kira, who se euphoria might just lead him to sprout wings and start soaring above the heads of a baffled group of men. He has to be Light Yagami: Ryuuga Hideki’s classmate and friend, son of Soichiro Yagami, and a young man committed to justice.

_Oh._ He almost loses it right then. _But this is justice._

Light doesn’t say a single word, but it’s as clear as day to see for the dying man looking up at Light from the floor. Light may as well have shouted it repeatedly until his voice cracked with blood.

_L, Do you know how pathetic you look, right now? I win! I win, I win and you lose! Now you’re going to die like a dog. How does it feel? Haha, you look so pathetic right now, has anyone told you what a freak of nature you are?_

It pleases Light to know that as L looks back up at him mutely, the detective has finally been robbed of all witty retorts and is unable to do anything but lie motionless in the thrall of Light’s victorious gloating. Rapturous joy floods his arteries knowing that Lhas finally been pinned like an insect under a dissecting microscope waiting to be transected.

_How does it feel knowing that I orchestrated your demise right under your nose? Sucks to be you, huh? I hope this hurts. I hope you’re in agony right now. Die knowing that I killed you because I am better than you. I am smarter than you, and you should have known not to get in my way. Don’t you know that gods are absolute?_

“Oi, Ryuuzaki!” He tries again, but with more conviction this time. A hoarse note pervades Light’s voice as he calls down to L’s rapidly expiring body. It almost sounds like they might have been genuine friends at some point instead of mortal enemies, but in reality this repeat performance is only because Kira’s victory doesn’t end with L’s death, it ends with the world in Light’s palms.

The Shinigami, Rem, dies stage left, the detective dies in Kira’s arms. Exeunt all, stage right.

Acting has always been one of Light’s many strengths; it helps now to have an outlet, however small, to exercise the manic energy building inside him. All the while the planes and edges of the detective’s world fade into black as ischemia takes its toll on the man’s oxygen starved brain and failing heart, destroying him from the inside out. Light amuses himself with the thought that the last thing the bastard will see is a wicked, inhuman smirk and he will die knowing what a loser he had been. It’s so fitting, it physically, viscerally hurts not to laugh. He watches in stroboscopic freeze frames as L’s eyelids droop and fall closed over glassy eyes that can no longer see.  
The deluge of suppressed victorious emotion comes pouring out of Light with the force of a bullet. He screams out the pressure building inside his lungs, scratching his throat as the tension deflates as rapidly as a popped balloon.

“AAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!”

He screams, and screams again, howling out his soul at the crowd, until there’s nothing left in him to scream and the desire to laugh finally empties into the tangential rush of his own adrenaline fueled shouting. Blood pounds in his skull and his ears. Light must sound as though he’s lost his mind entirely, but that, too, is just as planned; his falsified panic will seem all the more authentic this way.

“Calm down, Light-” he hears his father beginning to say, but Light carries on, riding the back of tremendous momentum, crashing headlong into his new role, a manic energy blazing through his usual controlled reticence. This time someone —Aizawa—beats him to it, and in the moment that Light glances at him through the corners of his eyes, he knows that this man, who has also started screaming for his life, out of the all the members of the task force, is the one to watch out for.

“We’ll all be killed!!! First Watari and Ryuuzaki, now us!!”

Light shouts wild-eyed, distraught, very much the portrait of a boy who believes he is on the precarious cusp between life and death, and yet he somehow manages to be didactic in his feverish yelling. The room erupts into a hilarious cacophony of grown men panicking and stumbling around. Light is then treated to the sight of Matsuda acting as though duck and cover will somehow protect him from cardiac arrest.

Amidst the chaos, as though he has no more patience for his act, Light unceremoniously tips L’s body onto the ground with as much reverential treatment afforded a butchered animal carcass. With the promise of imminent death still lingering in the room, nobody seems to care or notice.


End file.
